Sea Island Cotton and the Plantation Coast
Near St. Simons Island, Georgia
In the last years of the seventeen hundreds, a single crop reshaped this island. It was long staple cotton, better known as Sea Island cotton, with fibers longer, finer, and stronger than ordinary cotton, and it grew beautifully in the sandy coastal soil. In seventeen ninety three, John Couper and his partner James Hamilton bought land at Cannon's Point on the island's north end and made Sea Island cotton the leading crop.
Other great estates followed. Hampton, at the northern tip, had been purchased by Major Pierce Butler back in seventeen seventy four and became one of the island's largest plantations. Hamilton Plantation on Gascoigne Bluff and Retreat at the south end rounded out a landscape of prosperous cotton estates.
All of that wealth rested on the forced labor of enslaved Africans, whose descendants became the Geechee community. When the Civil War ended slavery, the whole system collapsed. Without enslaved labor, the planters found cotton unprofitable, the great houses fell into ruin, and many owners left the island for good.
The plantation coast that had made Saint Simons rich fell silent, and the land began its long turn toward the resort island it is today.
